Wyevale Garden Centre – Spring Week – Enchanted Mini Garden

The Hoopers do love a run out to the garden centre and the Wyevale Gosforth centre is one we often pop to as its only a couple of miles away from our home. A trip here fills a couple of hours in on a rainy day and although we aren’t huge gardeners (our AstroTurf lawn gives that away) we are usually tempted by the nice plants and herbs on offer. We seem to have a knack of killing of plants (especially mint which is meant to grow like a weed) so we are ideal, repeat customers!

A big hit with the girls is the concession shop of ‘The Works’ a treasure trove of bargain books, toys and crafts materials. When the girls were smaller we often met friends to have a coffee while the kids played in the small soft play area adjacent to cafe (small fee for this applies). The cafe is clean and spacious, with a selection of fresh cakes and sandwiches, and plenty of comfortable seating.

Spring Week – 4th to 8th April

In order to encourage the next generation of gardeners, Wyevale have put on a series of kids events each day between the 4th and 8th April. Priced between £2.50 and £5.00 per session including the materials. Sessions last 20 minutes which was pretty accurate. For further details on the events visit http://www.wyevalegardencentres.co.uk/spring-week

We booked for the Enchanted Mini Garden session at 11am, the centre was pretty quiet on this rainy Monday morning. The craft area was set up at the entrance to the store so easily visible. A friendly assistant Zoe was there to greet up and tick us off the list. In fact it was just us and another mother with her toddler.

We started by lining a seed tray with fresh compost. Once this was done the girls could go all creative making a fairy house with a small plant pot, a pond using silver foil, fence using lollipop sticks and once completed they could decorate using shells, moss and pebbles. The final step was to sprinkle grass seed and hope for it to grow and tempt those fairies to move in!

The girls were pleased with their finished gardens and gifted them to my Mam, when I dropped them off to be babysat for a few days while I went back to work. Let’s see if the grass grows! No pressure Mam!

Lunch to go

On the way out we grabbed a few of the ‘little digger’ picnic bag to take away as it seemed a little early to have lunch. Priced at £4.50 they included 5 items such as a fruit drink, ham of cheese sarnie, raisins, biscuits, crisps etc. If you pre-book the picnic with the gardening session the price goes down to £4.00. The girl at the cafe checkout hadn’t heard of this, but once I showed the confirmation email she was fine and let us through!

We had a nice hour in the garden centre en route to the babysitters and the girls enjoyed getting creative and making something different.

As the spring is now here, we can start to work on filling in those unfinished areas of the garden. I’m hoping this year Alan finished off the unfinished project at the bottom! Wyevale’s website is a good place to go for inspiration and advice. http://www.wyevalegardencentres.co.uk/